The Random Musings of a Mongrel

A theory to explain everything (or rather, to challenge all existing theories.)

The following is something that I have been kicking around in my head for a long while. While barely a rough draft I really wanted to start getting it down on paper.

I want to start by saying that my goal is to observe and relay information I have been pondering on, and not to draw any conlusions. As this deals with Religion, Spirituality, and the fundamental basis for all our understanding in the fields of science, I would like to note that I myself am going to keep my own beliefs out as much as possible.

Without Further Adieu, my attempt to explain through science and math why everything we know could be wrong.

To start, we have to review a few mathematic concepts. Namely, the idea of dimensions. We start with a point, which has no dimensions. A dot on a graph, that in our world represents a place but since no information can be gathered from it, it is dimensionless. A line is made up of an infinite number of points, and has one dimension. A point on a line is either to the left of or to the right of another point on a line. A infinite number of lines forms a plane. A plane is two dimensional. when we represent a point on a plane numerically, it is in an x,y fashion (as opposed to a line, which would simply be an x sort of thing.) A point on a plane can be up or down, left or right of another point on the same plane. 3d space, what we interact with, is made of an infinite number of planes. A point in 3d is represented with three numbers, x,y,z. It can either be near or far, up or down, left or right. It is in this third dimension that we interact with things, it is what live in. With me so far? Good, because it’s about to get weird.

There is no reason to believe the pattern stops at 3 dimensions. If a dot has no dimensions, an infinite number of points has one, an infinite number of lines has 2, and an infinite number of planes has 3, it stands to reason that an infinite number of spaces must have 4. And an infinite number of four dimensional “spaces” must have 5. And while this could go on forever, it’s that strange four dimensional “space” that concerns this article. We, as humans, perceive everything in three dimensions. Ergo if something were to exist in the fourth dimension, we would only perceive it as a 3d object. Even though it wouldn’t be. Any number of celestial beings, or even places, could exist all around us in the fourth dimension, and we would never know. We would have to take it on faith that these things existed. For all we know the world really could be on the back of a giant turtle walking along the “ground’ of the universe. Perhaps that turtle exists as a four dimensional creation, and the only part we can perceive of it is, say, the moon.

Lets delve deeper into understanding what I mean. Lets say you are a two dimensional creation. A circle, perhaps. You are a circle on your plane and are blissfully unaware of anything like a third dimension. Maybe you believe that time is the next dimension. And one day an orange, a 3d orange, passes into your plane. Now, you can only perceive the orange as another circle. (if you don’t get it, imagine drawing an orange on a piece of paper. What shape did you draw? Because that’s the 2d representation of an orange.) So, as a circle, you must assume that the orange is like you, just another circle. Or you can take it on faith that the other circle is an orange, something that exists outside of your own perception and certainly outside the realm of your understanding. Being a two dimensional object, you would really have no way to know. You would indeed have no way of knowing that it was a human that drew you on a sheet of paper, and then so callously set an orange near you. Or maybe your an orange as well.

You see, as a circle you must also take it on faith that you are a circle. Having only 2 dimensions is rather limiting. If you begin to believe that your fellow circle is indeed not a circle, but a sphere, that brings into question your own exitance. You could just as easily be a sphere. In fact you must question everything you ever knew. Perhaps your good friend square is really a table leg. What if old man rectangle is really an overturned pepsi can. You have to chose to believe something. Either your all 2d, and the orange is really 2d and everyone who says otherwise is wrong. Or your all 2d except the orange, with exists as a single 3d object, some kind of super being. Or you are all 3d, and simply can’t grasp the implications of being an object that has volume. And if thats not enough to make your little circle brain explode I don’t know what is.

Alright, alright, so enough of circles and oranges, whats that got to do with us? Simple. We are circles. We must take it on faith that we exist in 3d space and thats all there is to it, or that there is some kind of higher being, something that exists beyond our ability to comprehend, or we must acknowledge that we are all beyond our ability to comprehend. If we take into account the existance of a fourth dimension, any number of things could exists. Any number of things could be proven true.

For instance, many cultures and numerous religions have this idea of a ‘soul.’ That the death of the body does not constitute the end of exitance for that individual. This is fairly easy to believe if we exist in four dimensions. As we change our location and state in the fourth dimension, we would be altering our perception and others perception of our 3d selves. Back to oranges and circles, say you take a bite out of the orange. The circle just watched its new circle friend become a radically different shape. Say you lift the orange off the paper, and suddenly the circle is all alone. If we in 3d space can only watch and interact with people on that level, we can not understand what would be happening in the fourth dimension. If the soul, as we understand it, exists within 4d ‘space’ then it could be in a different part of ‘space’ than our body, and still be linked. In fact it could be moving around interacting with other souls. Ghosts could be explained away, as souls passing through our 3d space and altering it as they do. Precognition becomes a very really thing if you assume we can gather information from outside of 3d space. Think how good a guesser our circle could be if, unknown to the circle itself, it could see 3d space. Think if it could ‘see’ the orange descending onto the plane of exitance. It’s not psychic, there’s no magic. Perhaps some people are just more in tune with the connection between the soul in the fourth dimension and the body in the third.

Even more than that there could be any number of things that exist that we can’t perceive at all. Budha? Sure, he’s sitting outside of our 3d space, just chillin. Cthulu? Why not. The river Styx? Flows fourteen units to the unperceivable direction. There’s a lot your just going to have to decide to take on faith. Of course its not all about the religious side of things. Science, sorry, but your not excluded. In fact, if we assume this to be true, that there exists 4d space, then we must assume that science and religion are the same. If it’s mathematically sound that these occurrences exist, then it *is* scientific to believe in the turtle with the earth on it’s back. After all, gravity could be a purely mechanical function in the fourth dimension. Black Holes? Perfectly normal objects in th fourth dimension. Imagine introducing the circle to spilling coffee.

Fine, so what then, you say. So there is this entire existence that we can’t interact with and, in fact, can not even begin to properly understand. For many people there is this horrible clash between Religion and Science. That surely there must be some scientific evidence that religion is true, otherwise it is not. And lots of people struggle with faith, finding no way comprehend something being outside of understanding or perception. Maybe your not one of those people, and my little theory just sounds like a lame attempt to explain something everyone already knows. But for those of you who wanted a basis for faith, here is a mathematical, purely scientific reason that things can operate outside of human understanding and perception.

Thank you all, and good night. I would love to hear thoughts and critique. After an absolutely massive influx of spam, I had to instigate a “you need to enter a name and email” section to the comments, and I apologize as this is something I really did not want to do. I will not, however, clutter up everything, slow everything down and sacrifice hours of my time cleaning in order to continue with the completely open commenting.

4 Comments

After reading that post, I had to make a few comments, as my brother and I would definitely talk along these lines.

The 4th dimension can be expressed as time, in such a way that there are limitless repeated copies of the third dimension and a sequence of them becomes what we perceive as our own time. This does not mean that there are multiple times running in unison, and this leads to multiple universes and whatnot, but we won’t get into that.

We know that by getting closer to the speed of light, things experience less “time”, they age slower. This is taking into account we believe in our own “time” (as time is a thing we made up). Anything that exists in the 4th dimension (or beyond) experiences that dimension in a completely different way than we do, and likely understands that dimension far far better. Does God exist in a dimension higher than the 4th? We do say that God knows everything and can see everything, if you could experience every single aspect of time, you literally could travel through time, that would sum up God’s powers quite well.

It’s funny that you mentioned Cthulu, it is often explained that Cthulu is unexplainable, we cannot even begin to describe what it is, because it exists on a different dimension than that of our own. We often treat it as if it is a malevolent force, but it could just be the sheer indifference to anything that exists on a plane lower than its own we cannot truly comprehend. If circles on a piece of paper we created, became life, and we threw it in the garbage or crumpled it up, is this not the same thing?

I’ve often said that Science and Religion are two tools that are aiming for the same goal: explaining the unexplained/unexplainable. There is some serious zen-like teachings in Buddhism (to take your example) that can open the mind to new levels of understanding, that can teach us a little on how the world operates. Learning how the circulatory system works also teaches us a little on how the world operates. As does physics, meditation and so forth.

There is no right or wrong in our methods of learning, sadly the opposite is an ongoing preconception. Both sides of a war believe they’re on the “right” side, for example.

Finally, we simply cannot fully comprehend that which doesn’t exist in our own dimension, I don’t think we can begin to try. Believing it exists is faith just as much as believing we can figure it out for ourselves is faith. The only thing we should be doing, is respecting different ideas, as no single one is “right”, it’s merely another way to think of the unthinkable.

Interesting and well thought out post here. I like how you use the example of an orange and circle to explain the idea of 3 compared to 2 dimensions. There was a flash game I used to play that illustrated that concept, but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was called.

The question I would ask you would be, do you feel that other things on this earth are able to experience aspects of other dimensions that we as human beings cannot? For instance, animals are able to perceive ultraviolet light where we cannot. Do you think that it is possible, even likely, that other species are able to experience additional dimensions differently than we do?

I, for one, believe that there are creatures that perceive things very differently than humans do. I see time and time again things like “Cow predicts earthquake” or watched a cat stare at a wall for thirty seconds, completely infatuated with something. And since they seem to perceive something that we don’t, there really is no reason for me to believe that they are not more acutely aware of the fourth dimension than we are. We as a society don’t often give credit to animals, even with all the superstition and mythology surrounding various species, but it isn’t much of a leap to believe that your cat has a ‘soul’ that is interacting with your ‘soul’ and that the cat is very much aware of it. If we assume my premise to be somewhat correct, that is.

As for the fourth dimension being time. I agree that and infinite series of 3d spaces could be what we understand as time. If we continue our 2d analogy, if we were to make a flip book I do suppose that, in 2d space, it would make time travel forward. If you could draw an infinite number of pages, it would be all of time itself. I like it.

However I don’t think it’s true that we shouldn’t try to comprehend that which we may not be able to understand. Sixty years ago Homosexuality was a mental disorder. Two hundred years ago we were just starting to believe that there were things smaller than sand which were the legos that made up everything (Imagine, if you will, you are a dapper 1800s coachman and someone tells you that there are things which you cannot see even with the largest of glasses, that while there are many different types of “atom”, but not that many, they combine to form everything you can touch. Uncomprehendable to say the least) 600 years ago most people believed that if you left out trash, it made rats. Not that rats came from around the city to feast on trash, that they were literally generated by the trash. These are people that would not be able to comprehend germs and bacteria if you explained it a thousand times (Not that you’d get to a thousand, you’d be burned for heresy long before then.)

The capacity for human intelligence increases with every passing day. Trying to understand it all is part of the fun, because what we understand to be unthinkable will likely be common knowledge in the coming future.

Ah, but trash, rats, sand, atoms, etc. all exist in our dimension, so we can understand these things :3

I was more referring to trying to understand what God is, or whatever exists in higher dimensions than ours. But it may one day be possible! What I believe won’t deter others from trying, nor should it.